arXiv subjects

Shashank Kumar Ranu

Publications and source records attributed to Shashank Kumar Ranu.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Randomness can be certified in energy-constrained semi-device-independent scenarios

The prepare-and-measure framework based on energy constraints offers a practical middle ground between fully device-dependent and device-independent quantum cryptography. The only assumption on an otherwise uncharacterized prepare-and-measure device is that the energy of the prepared states is bounded. Existing security analyses of this framework assume that the preparation and measurement devices share at most classical correlations, and under this assumption certified lower bounds on the extractable randomness have been established. Recent work has shown that an adversary who pre-distributes entanglement between the devices can mount attacks that are strictly more powerful than those available when the devices share only classical correlations, reducing the extractable randomness below the previously certified rates. This leaves open the fundamental question of whether randomness can be certified at all in this scenario. We address this open question by constructing semidefinite programming relaxations of the guessing probability by adapting the Navascu\'es-Pironio-Ac\'in hierarchy to the energy-constrained setting where shared entanglement between the devices is permitted. Our relaxations yield certified lower bounds on the extractable randomness without enforcing any restrictions on the dimensions of the quantum state shared between the preparation and measurement devices. We show that these certified lower bounds are strictly positive for a range of energy values, thereby answering the open question affirmatively: certified randomness generation is theoretically possible in the energy-constrained SDI framework even in the presence of a fully quantum adversary.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Mitigating imperfections in Differential Phase Shift Measurement-Device-Independent Quantum Key Distribution via Plug-and-Play architecture

Measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) was originally proposed as a means to address the issue of detector side-channel attacks and enable finite secure key rates over longer distances. However, the asymmetric characteristics of the channels from the two sources to the measurement device in MDI-QKD impose constraints on successfully extracting a secure key. In this work, we present a plug-and-play scheme for MDI-QKD based on differential phase shift (DPS) encoding. Specifically, we analyze the effects of pulse-width mismatch and polarization mismatch between the pulses arriving at the measurement device. The polarization mismatch is modeled with an assumption of sharing a common reference frame, and the maximum allowable mismatch is found to be 11 degrees. Furthermore, we show that a channel length asymmetry of 176.5 km results in Hong-Ou-Mandel interference visibility of 0.37, thereby leading to zero secure key rates for a polarization-based MDI-QKD protocol. We then present a plug-and-play architecture for DPS-MDI-QKD as a solution to some of these issues, thereby paving the way for practical implementations of MDI protocols.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Estimating Coherent Contributions to the Error Profile Using Cycle Error Reconstruction

Mitigation and calibration schemes are central to maximize the computational reach of today's Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) hardware, but these schemes are often specialized to exclusively address either coherent or decoherent error sources. Quantifying the two types of errors hence constitutes a desirable feature when it comes to benchmarking error suppression tools. In this paper, we present a scalable and cycle-centric methodology for obtaining a detailed estimate of the coherent contribution to the error profile of a hard computing cycle. The protocol that we suggest is based on Cycle Error Reconstruction (CER), also known as K-body Noise Reconstruction (KNR). This protocol is similar to Cycle Benchmarking (CB) in that it provides a cycle-centric diagnostic based on Pauli fidelity estimation [1]. We introduce an additional hyper-parameter in CER by allowing the hard cycles to be folded multiple times before being subject to Pauli twirling. Performing CER for different values of our added hyper-parameter allows estimating the coherent error contributions through a generalization of the fidelity decay formula. We confirm the accuracy of our method through numerical simulations on a quantum simulator, and perform proof-of-concept experiments on three IBM chips, namely ibmq_guadalupe, ibmq_manila, and ibmq_montreal. In all three experiments, we measure substantial coherent errors biased in Z.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

QKD in the NISQ era: enhancing secure key rates via quantum error correction

Error mitigation is one of the key challenges in realising the full potential of quantum cryptographic protocols. Consequently, there is a lot of interest in adapting techniques from quantum error correction (QEC) to improve the robustness of quantum cryptographic protocols. In this work, we benchmark the performance of different QKD protocols on noisy quantum devices, with and without error correction. We obtain the secure key rates of BB84, B92 and BBM92 QKD protocols over a quantum channel that is subject to amplitude-damping noise. We demonstrate, theoretically and via implementations on the IBM quantum processors, that B92 is the optimal protocol under amplitude-damping and generalized amplitude-damping noise. We then show that the security of the noisy BBM92 protocol crucially depends on the type and the mode of distribution of an entangled pair. Finally, we implement an error-corrected BB84 protocol using dual-rail encoding on a noisy quantum processor, and show that the dual-rail BB84 implementation outperforms the conventional BB84 in the presence of noise. Our secure key rate calculation also takes into account the effects of CNOT imperfections on the error rates of the protocols.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Single magnon excited states of a Heisenberg spin-chain using a quantum computer

Excited states of spin-chains play an important role in condensed matter physics. We present a method of calculating the single magnon excited states of the Heisenberg spin-chain that can be efficiently implemented on a quantum processor for small spin chains. Our method involves finding the stationary points of the energy vs wavenumber curve. We implement our method for 4-site and 8-site Heisenberg Hamiltonians using numerical techniques as well as using an IBM quantum processor. Finally, we give an insight into the circuit complexity and scaling of our proposed method.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2021

Differential phase encoded measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution

We present a measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) using single photons in a linear superposition of three orthogonal time-bin states, for generating the key. The orthogonal states correspond to three distinct paths in the delay line interferometers used by two (trusted) sources. The key information is decoded based on the measurement outcomes obtained by an untrusted third party Charles, who uses a beamsplitter to measure the phase difference between pulses traveling through different paths of the two delay lines. The proposed scheme combines the best of both differential-phase-shift (DPS) QKD and MDI-QKD. It is more robust against phase fluctuations, and also ensures protection against detector side-channel attacks. We prove unconditional security by demonstrating an equivalent protocol involving shared entanglement between the two trusted parties. We show that the secure key rate for our protocol compares well to existing protocols in the asymptotic regime. For the decoy-state variant of our protocol, we evaluate the secure key rate by using a phase-post-selection technique. Finally, we estimate the bit error rate and the phase error rate, in the finite key regime.

quant-ph↗